Top Links from the MOOC Research Conference Twitter Backchannel (#MRI13)

2013-12-09

The MOOC Research Conference has
just taken place at University of Texas, Arlington, December 5-6, 2013.
I was fortunate to be on board of one research project – “Hatch,
Match, and Dispatch: Examining the relationship between student intent,
expectations, behaviours and outcomes in six Coursera MOOCs at the
University of Toronto” – which was among the 20+
MRI projects
participating in this MOOC Research Conference. Chris
Teplovs, Stian
Håklev and Laurie Harrison from our team
attended the conference in person, and they were surprised by an
Icepocalyse
in that area. Some people said it might be because too many Canadians
were present at the conference (which is quite convincing :-P).

Although I was not able to attend the conference, I had a lot of fun
following its
“backchannel” on
Twitter. The discussion took off one day before the conference (there
were pre-conference workshops) and climbed to its peak during the first
day, featured by the Jim
Groom‘s keynote. The backchannel produced
a total of 1894 tweets, with 394 contributors.

Here, I am pulling together a list of top URLs (up until now) shared in this
discussion, just to highlight a few things I think that might be
interesting to think of. This is by no means to say there links
represent the key messages of the conference, but by reviewing them we
may get a glimpse of main issues discussed during the conference. These
top links are organized into a few themes below.

As a history professor from Colorado State University and a guy who
thinks “MOOCs kinda suck”, Rees said, ”Yet it turns out that when
you put a bunch of MOOC enthusiasts in a conference together,
whatever orthodoxy that exists isn’t really all that far from
mine… That said, what does set me apart from the rest of this
conference I think is a difference in priorities. Most of the
conversations were about the pitfalls of producing MOOCs. I wanted
to talk more about how universities that may use other schools’
MOOCs might consume them. Most of the people here are from
disciplines outside of the humanities, so I tried to explain that
what works in math or CS will not necessarily work for history,
especially history survey classes. While everyone seemed interested
in improving pedagogy, there was a kind of disturbing assumption
underlying all my discussions that any class that doesn’t use
technology is somehow broken by definition.“

Rees contended that, “MOOCs threaten this kind of learning
[afforded by a very interactive and personalized teaching he has
been doing]. Yes, I know that we professors are supposed to use
MOOCs to flip our classrooms so that we can spend more time doing
exactly what I’m describing, but what will other students do all
class period when I’m providing personalized learning? When will
they have time to do the reading I assign if they’re watching all
those videos for homework? And, most importantly, how can I be sure
that my administration won’t just fire me and force students to fend
through a lot of taped lectures all by themselves?“

He also described his view about how MOOCs should work: “In an
ideal world, MOOCs would supplement modern higher education rather
than replace it. We do not live in an ideal world. I’m not
suggesting that people with better motives stop innovating. What I
am suggesting is that they cannot innovate in a bubble. There is a
political economy of MOOCs that matters just as much as their
technological structure, especially for those of us who will never
teach in or learn from a MOOC over the course of their academic
careers.“

MOOCs and learning analytics

Besides Simon’s post, this file contains links to breakout group
discussion around learning analytics in MOOCs, which was identified
as one of the key challenges to be addressed. This file also
contains links to discussion summaries of the other two
challenges: Organizational challenges to MOOC development and
delivery; and Systemic challenges with MOOCs: competency-based
learning, credit & credentialing. (It’s pretty neat to have such a
file, although some notes may not make sense to you.)

I’m personally glad to see people from the learning analytics
community present in the discussion.

A video describing UTS’ (what is UTS by the way?) vision of learning
environments

Hatch, Match and Dispatch

Finally, our group’s presentation about Hatch, Match and
Dispatch
was also among the list of top links (7 hits). Like other projects, our
work shared at the conference was still in progress. And I am really
excited about our next steps to move this research project forward.

If you wish to explore the Twitter archive by yourself, you can use the
web app here. You can filter
tweets by keywords or people you’re interested in. You can explore
people’s sentiments of MOOCs by checking out the “happiest” and
“saddest” tweets. You can also find and follow the “talkers” in this
backchannel conversation…